The REAL Bolognese: Preliminary considerations on the ingredients (part 1)

This post is not a simple task, it is closer to a war fought on three different battlefields: ingredients, tradition, and mainstream reception of this outraged recipe! I wish to start from a consideration on the ingredients. It is useless to say that good ingredients contribute to the realization of a better recipe. Nonetheless we do not have to be self-enslaved by the idea that only organic products provide the certainty of healthy food, because it would be a perspective falsification, but our life-eating-style can benefit of the use of organic aliments: fanaticism never helped any cause.

Therefore, for instance, organic (category 0) eggs fried in organic butter aren't healthier than an hard boiled egg of category 1 (the free range) perhaps accompained by a home grown salad [I shall discuss this argument further on, so to give to it the proper evidence and bring more logic examples] Or again if you combine an healthy meal with a sugary beverage (even if labelled as sugar-free) you are going to spoil anyway your efforts. Or finally, if you speed up your cooking process with the microwave you are possibly exposing your digestive system to a atrocious and unnatural solicitation, provoked by the microwaves themselves.

Let's just say, for the moment, that eating is a primitive form of chemistry so the entire process of eating from breakfast to dinner including snacks and non-forecasted assumptions of food has to be taken into serious account: the word "exception" is a key work in shaping a regular relationship with what we are eating (even when you buy a small bag of crisps, a chocolaty bar, a random dessert). Being hungry is a natural condition of our body, being hungry every ten minutes is counterproductive also, eating every ten minutes is a disaster in terms of money, calories assumed and, of course, for our body, kept constantly under stress. Sometimes it solely depends on how attentive we are to the mental processes that bring us to produce ourselves in some specific actions: stress, boredom, family habits may affect our perception on food, preventing us to see how irrational many of our behaviors are.
Here is the symbol of nourishment and breeding, a symbol of life: are we really paying attention to the milk we drink? Do we know the implications of milk mass production on cows, soils and final diary products?

The offer of Organic milks in Scotland

http://www.scottishorganicmilk.com/where_to_buy_organic.html

Milk is one of the most important ingredients also in the REAL bolognese: it lightens up the coulour of the final preparation, it provides taste, softens the texture of the meat itself, and keeps the mixture moistered cause it has to remain on the hob for two hours, yes two hours. Making a quick research I came across different offers of Milk, both in the UK and in the North America.

There is a debate between organic and donkey millk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/17/which-milk-is-best-organic-or-donkey

Here there is the Marshall California organic milk,

but also the Canadian cousins are doing their best:

http://harmonyorganic.on.ca/page/who_we_are

Here in the UK, the highly underestimated Prince Charles, is doing a great personal job. Prince Charles, in my view, is the future under many aspects. He has the knowledge, prestige, charm, and social network to promote a wider change in society. Unluckily the 2008 crisis made his company Duchy wobble too much, in a moment in which it was not yet prepared to stand alone, and so Waitrose had to take over [http://www.theweek.co.uk/people-news/20883/waitrose-buy-prince-charles-food-range]

What happened it is an enormous pity because Prince Charles' efforts are genuine and wise and part of a world movement, which encourages a reasonable turnabout. He could have stayed behind the guarded walls of his castles, but His Grace is spending his time, energies and credibility to send a message. And now that he does not own his former company He appears even more credible. Here you may enjoy is polished writing along with Mr Carlo Petrini's one and the nobel prize Mrs Vandana Shiva's one (one of my modern heros).

This book provides you with a multi-layerd idea(l), 

I am suggestion to buy it on Amazon.co.uk,

because is more practical, 

but every bookshop is a parallel universe 

(do not let the area bookshops die)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Manifestos-Future-Food-Vandana-Shiva/dp/0896087778/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1342365300&sr=8-5

I leave you today with this image on a smoked Italian pancetta

(pick it up at your favourite delicatessen shop,

mine are Peckhams and Valvona & Crolla

here in Edinburgh, although I suspect that Marchmont area

offers some surprises as well)

I cut it in both directions as a meaty chess-borad:

this is the second main basic ingredient of the Bolognese sauce